June 2015 Content Wrap-Up

As the world spins out of control in its inevitable death spiral toward the sun (which North Korea just landed on, btw), the content continues to roll forth. With kids out of school and abnormally-blue skies appearing in the Seattle area, it was supposed to be a quiet month for travel (which is was), allowing me to focus on business development, customer activities, and a backlog of content ideas waiting to be completed. I spent a solid portion of my writing efforts on completing two ebooks for a new entrant into the Office 365 ISV backup/archiving space, Datto, with the first available below, and the second currently in the design process, soon to be released. Other major activities included hosting the Metalogix Best of Breed panel webinar where we discussed some of our shared takeaways from the Ignite Conference in May, a streamed session on migration to the cloud as part of the SPBiz Conference (from the team that brought you SP24.com last year), and a loaded schedule for the inaugural Unity Connect Online event, organized by the ITUnity.com team, where I presented a session on behalf of Colligo (Honing Your SharePoint UX Skills), and also participated in panels on the future of collaboration tools, and the maturity of social collaboration deployments. Great stuff – always fun to participate in such high-quality activities without the need to pass through an airport.

Having said that, I’m gearing up for what looks to be a fairly busy travel schedule during the second half of the year, although with a slow start. July has just a single event, but its big – my 6th Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference, taking place this year in Orlando. That’s it for travel until end of August (and after an inaugural SharePointFest here in my home town of Seattle!), when I’ll be heading down to Auckland, New Zealand for the Digital Workplace Conference (formerly the New Zealand SharePoint Conference). Always thrilled to visit NZ – let me tell you, I would *love* the opportunity to relocate there for a year or two at some point, and have explored a good portion of the south island. That event coincides with Ignite New Zealand, after which I’m heading to Oslo, Amsterdam, and Barcelona….all in September. Throughout my travels, as always, I’ll try to keep publishing content at a regular clip.

As for content in June, I did try to write on some general business topics this past month, although not as much as I would have liked. I have a stack of magazine articles torn out with notes in the margins, but I have yet to commit most of those article ideas to digital format because I’m so focused on technology topics. Hoping to add more to this collection in July:

The theme of social collaboration – and specifically of social as a primary driver for improvements to the user experience (UX) – is something near and dear to my heart, and I was able to produce a few blog posts this past month venturing into the topic. The article I did for CMSWire here at the top of this list brought some interesting commentary from the community, including some private messages from concerned people who viewed it as a slam on Yammer, which it wasn’t (honest). While I have been critical of Microsoft’s messaging around social collaboration for a few years now, as with many of my UX-centric articles and blog posts, it is more of a commentary on the need for a better understanding of your requirements up front before attempting to solve a problem with technology. I’ve seen many attempts at deploying social collaboration tools without an understanding of the business goals, without an understanding of how the tools work on their own or in concert, or without understanding how they will measure success.

Specifically around Office 365, as I mentioned above, I wrote an eBook for Datto in June, a backup/archiving vendor with deep roots in the Google space, but now with a new offering for O365. My second eBook, out later this month (July), also covers the security options in O365 and how Datto/Backupify can help mitigate risks:

Never shy about self-promotion, June saw a few posts promoting business building activities, some posts in preparation for WPC, promotion of my monthly CollabTalk show on IT Unity (which you can register for at www.itunity.com/go/collabtalk), and an announcement about a new GTconsult governance workshop series that we are calling “Jam Sessions”:

Christian is a Microsoft Regional Director and Office Apps & Services MVP, and the Founder & CEO of CollabTalk LLC, an independent research and technical marketing services firm based in Lehi, Utah, through which he provides fractional-CMO for partners in the Microsoft ecosystem.